Two years on, ‘Gujarat Queen’ suicide case still open for investigation, say cops

As per the accounts in the personal diary, a sexual assault had taken place at the Vaccine Institute Ground in Vadodara on October 29, prompting the Valsad Railway Police to register an FIR of abetment to suicide and gangrape on November 14, 2021– 10 days after her body was recovered from a coach of the Gujarat Queen Express.

The SIT, headed by Inspector General of Police Subhash Trivedi (CID- Crime and Railways), has not made any arrests in the case so far.

However, as per officials, the investigation is “ongoing” even as the police personnel from Vadodara city and also the Railway Police, who were part of the original special investigating team, have been transferred, including the then Superintendent of Western Railways Parikshita Rathod as well as the Investigating Officer Railways Deputy Superintendent of Police BS Jadav.

Saroj Kumari, Superintendent of Police of Western Railways, told The Indian Express on Thursday, “The investigation is ongoing. We have used electronic intelligence, human intelligence and even Internet Protocol Detail Record (IPDR) to gather clues in an in-depth, far-spread investigation, but so far, we have not been able to find any clues… The case is still open but the SIT will soon review the case and decide on the future course.”

SIT officials said that the “inconclusive medical report” as well as the absence of direct eyewitnesses has not worked in the favour of the investigating team. It conducted an exhaustive search of people —  auto drivers, food delivery agents, and vendors — across the city to match the description of the accused, narrated by the victim in her personal diary. They were believed to be present in the vicinity of the ground where the purported sexual assault occurred on October 29, as per the diary entries.

The post-mortem report, accessed by The Indian Express had stated that “no conclusive sexual assault” took place.

“The deceased person died due to asphyxial death but a final cause of death can be given after the FSL and histopathology report,” the post-mortem report said. The panel post-mortem was conducted by Dr Manoj Das and Dr Jinal Patel of Gujarat Medical Education and Research Society (GMERS)-run Medical College Hospital of Valsad, after receiving the body from the Valsad Railway Police.

The post-mortem report mentioned the presence of “old wound abrasions over the right thigh of five centimetres in length, a wound of six centimetres on the left upper arm and a four-centimetre wound on the right inguinal region, all black in colour.”

The report stated that there was “no evidence of injury or fracture” on the victim’s skull, although the victim has said that she was dragged over a stone path, causing her to pass out with injuries on her head. The SIT also received no support from the victim’s forensic and histopathology reports, which have remained inconclusive about the alleged sexual assault, officials confirmed.

Two persons were interrogated by the SIT in December 2021, including a security guard, from whose possession the victim’s cycle was allegedly found in a damaged condition. They were, however, given a clean chit in the gangrape.

The investigators also tried to match the available witness accounts with the incident described in the personal diary of the accused but stated that they were “not able to fit the narration of the gangrape with the circumstantial evidence gathered by probe teams.”

According to the victim’s account in her personal diary, she had been allegedly abducted from a lane near the Vaccine Institute while she was riding her bicycle and taken to a deserted spot inside the ground and raped by two men. The victim, in her diary, said that her culprits wanted to kill her but decided to rape her before killing her.

The victim’s parents, on Thursday, said that their attempts to seek an update from the investigators were unsuccessful. Her mother, in a phone conversation on Thursday, told The Indian Express, “I have not received any update from the police. I doubt that the case is even being investigated. My daughter’s death is a mere file for the police that has been left in cold storage. Since all the officers have been transferred, we have no hope left… We have been seeking a CBI probe but after the initial promises, no one has checked on us.”

The victim’s mother said that the family continues to believe that she did not die by suicide. “We firmly believe that she was killed. Even if she did it herself, she was pushed to do so… The police have not taken action against the institution where she was living alone and was brainwashed to keep secrets from her family,” she shared.